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Windows Development - does size matter?

There has been a lot of discussion this week stemming from the article over at the E7 blog about the size of the Windows 7 development team. Persons are saying, Windows 7's human resources are just too big and hard to manage. Microsoft (Steven Sinofsky) response to that is, its the scope of the project that determines how many persons are allocated to developing the product. The Windows Team is divided into 23 + Development Teams.

Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):

Applets and Gadgets
Assistance and Support Technologies
Core User Experience
Customer Engineering and Telemetry
Deployment and Component Platform
Desktop Graphics
Devices and Media
Devices and Storage
Documents and Printing
Engineering System and Tools
File System
Find and Organize
Fundamentals
Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
International
Kernel & VM
Media Center
Networking - Core
Networking - Enterprise
Networking - Wireless
Security
User Interface Platform
Windows App Platform

Looking back in the past, the size of the Windows Development Team, seems to have varied, if you take a look back at Windows Server 2003, the size of the Windows Team was 5,000 Developers. Here is a quote from Paul Thurrotts, Windows Server 2003: Road to Gold Part 2: Developing Windows:

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Windows Server Architect Mark Lucovsky told me. "Now there are 5000 member of the Windows team, plus an additional 5000 contributing partners, generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003. It's the biggest software engineering task ever attempted. There are no other software projects like this."

Thats 10,000 developers depending on how you look at it. Considering that Windows 7 consist of both client and server and the approximation of Developers is around 2,500 it doesn't spectacularly amazing about the size of the Development Team in this release.

For Windows 2000, Microsoft noted a higher amount of developers worked on the project than is now allocated to Windows 7, if todays estimates are correct:

"Microsoft has invested more than $1 billion in the development of Windows 2000, and more than 5,000 employees worked on the new platform, Gates said".

Microsoft Presspass: Windows 2000 Now Broadly Available

So, the enthusiast communities astonishment is a bit strange in my opinion, a project like Windows as Mark Lucovsky said is huge, taking into account the audience and segments of the market. Windows is not the Windows of 90's or early 2000's, this project that has changed dramatically over the years and continues to grow in features and yes, size. Popularity: 1%

Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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